James Retallack has written a provocative and compelling set of essays on right-wing politics that spans the period from the 1860s to Weimar, the decades of the modernization of Germany in every sense. The essays, which draw on previously published material, reflect a career (thus far) of research and rich reflection on German politics and political culture. As Retallack explains, the essays are designed to trace history and chart historiography simultaneously. The collective result forces historians to rethink many of the current orthodoxies about the nature of politics, political change, and the endurance of authoritarian influence in Germany.

Specifically, the essays examine the political adaptation of right-wing parties and groups in Imperial Germany. They evaluate German conservatives' negotiation of regional and ideological diversity as they developed strategies to mobilize new political sources unleashed by universal manhood suffrage in 1867 and 1871. All political parties had to adjust to the new constitutional structures and the erosion of the traditional “politics of notables,” of course, but for conservatives the goal was to retain their authority and their ties to the monarchical state. The trick, according to Retallack, was “to reconcile mass inclusion with political exclusivity” (p. 6), and the Right did so with remarkable success in perhaps unexpected ways. While historians have argued that the shift to “mass politics” occurred in the 1890s or that Germany was in a transition to democracy in fits and starts by the turn of the century, Retallack surveys the longue durée, refusing to privilege any single decade in particular. The tragic legacy of the German Right, he argues, is that it garnered the dynamism and innovation needed to retain its authority without imagining a broader, positive vision of conservatism.

Following the introduction, Retallack begins with a commanding review of the debates from the 1920s through more recent arguments about “manipulation from above” and “self activation” and “politics in a new key” that have shaped German political historiography. Clearly the study of conservatism in Germany has maintained a remarkable vitality, but still, Retallack suggests, major questions require attention. Rethinking demagoguery and populism as they have been used as concepts by historians, he argues that the 1860s and 1870s were at least as important in terms of fundamental political change as the 1890s. At the same time it would not be the case that the old Right had transformed itself into something new or that a new Right had taken its place before the end of the First World War.

Retallack therefore eschews the search for epochal turning points to examine instead why Germany's political institutions remained consonant with so many of its citizens' expectations throughout the Kaiserreich. The political system was not rigid or unchanging. It tended to gradualism, crisis management, and accommodation. This permitted the stabilization of a system in which Germans may not have got what they deserved but they got what they wanted. (Well, at least most Germans.) By the fourth chapter, Retallack moves the analysis to the regional level, emphasizing the history and historiography of the Kingdom of Saxony, to examine how German identities were constituted in smaller settings by “culture builders, nation builders, and identity-builders,” both liberal and conservative. Such regional work, he contends, confounds national, transnational, and global generalizations. Another chapter concentrating on Saxony argues that it is less important to assess the suffrage reform as modern or unmodern than it is to understand how a political culture in transition forced Germans to rethink their strategies for system stabilization. A chapter devoted to municipal politics in the cities of Chemnitz, Leipzig, and Dresden examines efforts to recast the suffrage in ways that would advance the influence of liberal burghers. They did so not with selfish cynicism but the principled conviction that they had a natural claim to social, economic, cultural, and political leadership.

Retallack explores, too, the social history of German political journalism. As journalists developed a professional standing in the course of the nineteenth century, liberals applauded their increasing influence. Conservatives condemned the social and political changes that promoted the stature of journalists and even blamed journalists on the Right for promoting these changes. Focusing on the political culture of conservatism in Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, and Saxony, Retallack argues that anti-Semitism infiltrated and shaped German conservatism earlier and more thoroughly than most historians have recognized. In a focus on the Kaiser's executive government and council, Retallack studies the relationship between the monarch and the Conservative Party. Even as conservatives and the government found ways to cooperate for the purpose of system maintenance, government leaders resented the Conservative Party's appeal to the radical opposition of the masses in times of political crisis. In the final chapter, Retallack argues that Bethmann-Hollweg was locked in a love-hate relationship with the Conservative Party, a party that at crucial moments turned toward opposition and to which the chancellor ceded a position of authority. Bethmann's reliance on the conservatives exposed the limits of his own authoritarian imagination.

Retallack's prose is alive with wit and cheeky gestures: intestinal immotility, “cramping and constipation,” characterize Wilhelmine Germany's dysfunctional body politic (p. 113). The volume is handsomely produced and replete with instructive illustrations. Regrettably there is not a bibliography. Substantively, one might be left with questions about the gender, economic, and religious and confessional dimensions of conservative political culture and the authoritarian imagination. But it is always easy to wish for yet more.

This is a first-rate collection by a historian of the first rank. It makes us appreciate German conservatism's accommodation, conditioning, and manipulation of modernity in new ways. We are richer for the volume, and it will certainly be read by all historians who seek to understand Germany's twisted and ultimately devastating path through the modern political era.